Danish Labour wiped out over racist turn

The Labour-like Social Democrats suffered their biggest defeat in over a century (Photo: WikipediaCommons)

The Danish local elections saw the Labour-type Social Democrat Party suffer sweeping loses.

This is the party whose brutal stance on immigration home secretary Shabana Mahmood is desperate to emulate.

The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, led the Social Democratic party to a catastrophic defeat. The party lost control of the capital Copenhagen for first time in more than 100 years and suffered losses across the country.

Frederiksen chose her close friend, Pernille Rosenkrantz-Theil, to run for lord mayor of Copenhagen. But she was defeated by a candidate from the Green Left.

But for the far right Danish People’s party also grabbed some votes. Their support rose slightly from 4.09 percent to 5.9 percent.

Even in defeat, Frederiksen doubled down on the racism which lost her party support. She tried to blame the defeat on crime committed by “people coming from outside”.

Experts argued that, on the contrary, voters were sick of the prime minister’s hardline policies on issues such as integration and immigration–exactly the policies Mahmood envies.

Lene Junker, a Danish socialist, told Socialist Worker, “Right now we have a government of the extreme centre, with Social Democrats and the Liberal Party. They lost a lot of support in these local elections.

“Despite all the racist propaganda with the prime minister being tough on all Muslims—the Social Democrats didn’t gain.

“We can see from the figures, that the votes they have lost went to the left—to the Socialist People’s Party and the Red-Green alliance. These are parties who talk about welfare, climate catastrophe and so on.

“Most of the votes have gone to them. But others went to the radical right.

“There are two parties in parliament which belong to the radical right—the Danish People’s Party and Denmark Democrats. They picked up voters who have bought into the racist logic that the Social Democrats have promoted.

“In Copenhagen alone 47 percent, about 175,000 people, voted for parties to the left of the Social Democrats. So against the extreme right, we are the many.

“We have to mobilise against racism, and against our government spending 5 percent of GDP on military spending. We want more spent on welfare, which is has been cut back for people.”

Denmark once prided itself on its liberal welfare state and human rights. But it has spent the past decade turning itself into a fortress against those fleeing violence and war, as reported in Socialist Worker.

The turning point for Denmark’s asylum system came in 2015. A change to the Aliens Act allowed authorities to revoke refugee status if conditions in someone’s home country had improved—even when those improvements were fragile or unpredictable.

Refugees were denounced as wealthy scroungers intent on leeching from the Danish benefits system. From 2016, their jewellery was confiscated as they arrived to seek safety.

Between 2017 and 2018 around 900 Somali refugees lost their residence permits.

Then in 2019, as the Social Democrats returned to office, parliament approved a huge attack on refugee rights. People with children, people who had been settled in Denmark for ten years, could now be deported.

The European Court of Human Rights found that Denmark violated the right to family life under the European Convention on Human Rights.

Last year, the European Court of Justice accused Denmark of racial discrimination for mass evictions in “ghetto” neighbourhoods where a high proportion of residents are migrants.

The elections in Denmark show that

Labour cannot “out racist” the far right. And it shows the need for an anti-racist left alternative to the centre and the far right in Britain.